It’s a great privilege to be invited to speak at this
combined service. This significant step on the courageous journey that you are
on, of becoming something new. Of coming together and working together to
further God’s call on you as God’s people here in Whangarei. I couldn’t help
but think that it was great that one of the parishes was called ‘Trinity’
because it’s kind of like that ‘three but they are one’, ‘one but there are
three’ and all the thought that has to go into understanding how that works.
As I have thought and prayed about Whangarei the thing that
keeps coming to mind is that it is a ‘New Day Whangarei’.
It’s a New Day Whangarei’.
It’s a new day and I’m sure on one level we know that. We
know that it’s a new day, that the world just seems to have changed and
continues to change. A small example…My wife Kris and I listened to CD’s on the
way up in the car, and I have some of my music loaded off my Cd collection as
MP3’s on my phone, which blue tooth’s with the car, and I think I’m up with the
play, but my twenty something kids,
that’s age not number, are part of the digital age and they tell me I’m a
dinosaur, ‘no one listens to CD’s I should get spotify, and stream the music.
It’s really funny my 23 year old son listens to the same classic rock that I
do, but how he does it has totally changed. It’s a new day.
I’m sure on one level that we know that it is a new day
Whangarei, that the city has changed and continues to change. When we came up in
December, we looked around the new housing areas. We sat over the river in a friends lounge and were told that the industrial area down by the river
is going to be turned into housing, apartment and town houses. It’s to
accommodate all those Aucklanders coming north, sorry. The city is changing
when we came up in December we got here too late for the markets, but we drove
through the centre of town and it was quite and closed, we went down to the
Okara Park shopping centre and we could have been at any mall in Auckland it
was packed. You probably know more than
I do about change up here. Demographic change, cultural change, the growing
divide between haves and have nots.
It’s a new day when it comes to Church as well. We live in a
post Christian country, a place where ex YFC director Ian Grant says most
people have forgotten what church their grandparents were staying away from.
People do not know the gospel story, they are more at home with a negative characture
of Christianity. Church culture has
changed, and you are aware of churches that are in your city who have started
and focus on being pop culture churches, they meet a different younger demographic.
How we’ve done church in the past kind of doesn’t fit.
Leonard Sweet uses the metaphor of the church facing a series
of different patterns of change that are like weather systems and have collided
to form the perfect storm. He says we can hunker down in the bunker and try and
ride the storm out and hope we won’t get blown away, or we can unfurl our sails
and see where the wind of the Spirit will take us. Like the volvo ocean race,
or Sir Peter Blake in the Whitbread… and see where it will take us… and I see you starting
that journey. It may seem like it’s out of necessity and survival mode, but the
message of it’s a New Day Whanagrei is not about how the world has changed.
It’s a message of hope because the important things have not changed.
It’s a New Day Whangarei… because of who our God is ,
because of who our Lord is, Jesus Christ, it is because God’s Holy Spirit
dwells within.
Our Old Testament reading this morning comes from the book
of Lamentations. In the midst of Jerusalem’s worst tragedy and upheaval and
defeat, the book captures everyone’s grief and sorrow. Amidst the voices, one
of the poets says ‘this I remember and I have hope, that the steadfast love of
the Lord never ceases, it is new every morning’. Maybe as a boy he’d been at
the temple and recited Psalm 136, which tells Israel’s journey through the
wilderness, and after every line, after ever step has the refrain… His love
endures forever… and it came to the poets mind right at the horrific start of
the exile giving hope that God is still there, God still cares and God can be
trusted to lead us through. It’s a new day because the stead fast love of the
Lord never ceases, it is new every morning.
I am reminded of that every morning when I wake up. We live
in a three storied row house in Onehunga, the living quarters are on the third
floor. We have this wonderful view down the hill to the Manukau harbour. Off to
the east is the motorway bridge, we can see the tops of the concrete silos on
the wharf at Onehunga, and off to the west we look over the water, over Mangere to the distant
Awhitu peninsula. Every morning it is
totally different. Yes the landscape and the infrastructure is still the same.
The neighbours TV mast is still there, there is a constant flow of traffic
along the south western motorway, but somehow its different and fresh. The
bridge can be red or golden or the starkest of white or even purple as the sun
rises. The harbour can be grey and moody, or blue and spotted by low tide
mudflats. Then on a mirror still day simply a multi-coloured reflection of the
far shore. It can be raining, or even have disappeared under a thick blanket of
fog… but it is different and new every morning.
God’s love and faithfulness is new and able to bring light
and new perspective and hope for this Day and the days ahead. They are new days
because of the freshness of God’s constant faithful love.
In our New testament reading, Paul talks of the fact that we
are a new creation in Christ, because of the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ, the old has gone and we have this new life welling up within us. For
Paul he says this changes everything he now sees people through the lens of
Jesus Christ, not as the world sees them, his purpose has changed, he is called
to the ministry of reconciliation, his identity is now as an ambassador of
Christ. Paul is speaking to a church as well, letting them know that they too
are God’s New Creation. We are God’s new creation. It is a new day as God
continues to create new things in and through us.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of new creation over
summer. I’ve spent a lot of times with birds hovering round my head. As I’ve
gone walking these pied stilts have got agitated about my presence where they
were nesting, so they’d hoover then dive bomb me. Like Tom Cruise in his F16,
buzzing the control tower, in the movie Top Gun. I was preaching on Jesus
Baptism in Matthew’s gospel, and I reflected on the fact that all the art work
that I’ve seen has the Holy Spirit hovering as a dove over Jesus, but the
scripture says that it came down and alighted on him, it landed and came to
rest. It stayed with him. I went and read Acts 2 and the account of Pentecost,
the same thing, I’ve always seen artwork with the flames above peoples heads,
but it says they rested on people and they were all filled with the Holy
Spirit. The Holy Spirit hovered over the waters of creation in genesis, when
Mary conceives, it is as she is over shadowed by God, hovering, but this new
creation is by the Holy Spirit dwelling in our lives, made possible by Christ’s
death and our sins being forgiven and the slate whipped clean. This new
creation starts within us.
We may think that it’s a one off event, we might associate
it with salvation, but the Spirit of God is at work within us individually and
corporately as a church, making us new, making us whole, making us into God’s
new people, into the vision of the Kingdom of God to be about the mission that God has for us
today… not just there and then but here and now in this new day we face.
It’s a New Day, Whangarei.
The church in the west in recent years has been going
through a new reformation, and it’s as radical and revolutionary as that in the
16th century. Perhaps it
would be better to say the Church is going through a reformission. Reforming
for mission, you may have heard this new word being used a lot being missional.
In terms of the passage in 2 Corinthians we are looking at you could say the
first reformation was about a rediscovery that God has reconciled us to himself
through Christ, and Christ alone, by faith as taught by scripture, the new
reformation is a rediscovery of ‘and Christ gave us the ministry of
reconciliation, that we are the embassy of God’s kingdom. That has happened in several
waves, the great missionary movement in the 19th century onwards,
but it was always over there, somewhere else, something that we support from
here, and the big name big rally evangelism in the 20th century it
was something that others did from elsewhere, here. Now it’s the realisation
that the purpose of the church is and always was to be about being about God’s
mission of reconciling the world to himself in Christ. It is outward looking.
The picture that Paul uses is of an embassy, and ambassadors
of Christ. In Auckland I drive past the Chinese consulate nearly every day.
It’s funny to think that the moment I step into that compound that I have
stepped into the sovereign territory of China. Of course I can’t just walk up
to it because it has a steel gate that is opened electronically by some hidden
security guard. In fact when I stopped my car and got out my camera and took some
photos of the embassy, the gate did open and about six men came out and took
note of my car number plate, checked me out and walked down the road and then
back in the other gate. However all of China’s diplomatic and cultural
connections with Auckland start at that place. If I want to go to China I have
to deal with these people as well. Hopefully the picture of a steel gate and
security guards to keep people out isn’t a picture of the church. But it’s a
new day Whangarei because coming together allows you to have a fresh sense of
vision a fresh sense of passion for Whangarei, to ask a new how are you to be
about that ministry of reconciliation, bring people together to and in Christ,
how are going to go about diplomatic connection for the Kingdom of God in this
city. How is Whangerei going to be blessed by this new thing that you are
doing.
Let me share with you a
vision of what I mean.
Our Old Testament reading comes from the start of the exile,
Ezekiel the prophet has a series of visions that he shares with those in exile
of what the new day for Israel coming back to the land will look like. In
Ezekiel 47, there is a vision that I feel fits what is happening here at
Whangarei. It is the picture of the river flowing out from the temple in
Jerusalem, out into city, out into the wilderness, down into the Jorden valley
and out into the dead sea. A river that is deep and wide and everywhere it
flows along its banks grow fruit trees, that bear fruit all year round to feed
people, and the leaves provide healing. Everywhere it flows is new life and
wholeness, even the dead sea becomes fresh and teeming with fish, and a
thriving fishing community grows up on its shore. In John 7 Jesus at the
festival of tabernacles, stands on the very steps of the temple where Ezekiel
had seen the river flow and says ‘come to me and drink and never be thirsty
again, and who ever believed in me rivers of living water would flow from with
in them…”
My understanding of the geography of Whangarei may be a bit
limited but I couldn’t help but think of the three churches here represented
being tied together not just by history and denomination, but by river as well.
The Hatea river with Trinity Tikpunga, at the falls, St Andrew’s here, on the
hill just before it dips steeply down to the Tidy estuary, and St James
Onerahi, their identity as a suburb being over the other side and at the
headlands where the river becomes the wider harbour. But also that river of
living water that wells up in us, and flows through and out of us to be a
source of fruitfulness and healing in this city.
It’s a new day Whangarei.
It’s not an easy journey you are on. There are some
challenges, decision to be made, choices you are faced with. Change is not
easy, you have to look at what you do and have and see what you’ll need for the
new day. There are people who you’d call neophiles, they love the new, you see
them everytime there is a new iPhone released, lining up to be the first to
have it. While we need to embrace change we have many precious important traditions and treasures that are
worth holding on to that will be useful in this new day. There is a wonderful
line in the U2 song ‘Walk On’ which is dedicated to Myanmar politician and
social activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, that sums up that challenge it says
‘you’re packing a suit case for a place that you’ve never been, a place that
has to be believed to be seen’. You are on that journey. But it’s a journey
with Christ by the Holy Spirit, in Psalm 121 as the pilgrim looks at his
journey to Jerusalem he looks to the hills and wonders where his help will come
from, the rest of the psalm is a description of God as the faithful and
reliable caravan guide who will not let them succumb to the dangers in the hot
desert or the cold and danger filled nights.
It’s a new day, Whangarei
God bless you as you move into it
It’s a new day Whangarei
know that God is on the journey with you and waits for you
as that new day dawns.
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